Researching the occult practices in Socialist Yugoslavia, I came across a fantastic PhD dissertation (and book) by Nikola Pešić on the “Occult in the art of Marina Abramović” (I was happy to find out that his mentor was the great Professor Nemanja Radulović who I interviewed for my Pokretači podcast). Apart from Pešić’s analysis of Abramović’s work, he also includes a brief history of occult culture in post-WWII Yugoslavia.
One of the key protagonists of this wave was Marko Pogačnik, a Slovene artist and esotericist who was one of the founders of the OHO group. OHO was influenced by the 1960s and 1970s hippie culture and embraced nature and Eastern mysticism to the point of moving to Šemas, a Slovene mountain village close to the Italian border. While Pogačnik self-isolated from the world of mainstream contemporary art, he was prominent enough in Slovenia to be the designer of the country’s coat of arms. His other pieces are “litho-puncture” slabs, customarily made out of marble and featuring an abstract design, which he places to “heal the earth.” These geomantic structures are placed all around Slovenia (which boasts of being one of the greenest countries in the world). Still, thanks to a particularly strange project of Belgrade’s Health and Environment agency (along with a few arts foundations), they found their way to Belgrade in 2008-9. As part of the project titled “Belgrade’s energetic spine,” Pogačnik placed three bronze plaques with his designs at Avala (by the Monument to the Unknown Soldier), Tašmajdan Park, and Kalemegdan Park in the hope of healing the city and boosting its vibes.
His choices were led by the features and energy of these three places, which he considers especially powerful.
He considers Avala, a defunct volcano that has attracted the attention of esotericists because it had an ancient Žrnov fortress blown up to make space for Meštrović’s (masonic-looking) Monument, a sort of root chakra of the city, which he considers a “holy mountain” containing Belgrade’s and Serbia’s spiritual archetypes. He thinks that “gravity is suspended at Avala” and that one uses its energy to ascend to higher realms.
Tašmajdan Park, on the other hand, is Belgarde’s solar plexus. For Pogačnik, it contains the female aspect (represented in its caves and water below them) as well as male, fiery energy, which he finds in the exposed limestone cliffs of the old stone quarry.
Kalemegdan park, ultimately, is Belgrade’s crown chakra, where the earthly and heavenly powers converge. However, Pogačnik thinks that Kalemegdan has been overly burdened by the negative militaristic energy and that it is especially necessary to unleash its spiritual aspects.
Fifteen years later, only the plaque at Avala is intact. The one at the Tašmajdan, placed on its main avenue, was probably removed (or paved over) during the park’s redesign, while who knows what happened to the one at Kalemegdan, which rougly is below the fence of the new Dino park.
Plaques or no plaques, you can try to sense the energy of these three places, which have had very important roles in Belgrade’s history and have been marked by some of the city’s most remarkable monuments.
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